# AutiHero: Engaging Parents in Creating Personalized, Multi-path Social Narratives for Autistic Children

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17608 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17608/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 83 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [LLM Cannot Discover Causality, and Should Be Restricted to Non-Decisional Support in Causal Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00844/) (2025)
- [AACessTalk: Fostering Communication between Minimally Verbal Autistic Children and Parents with Contextual Guidance and Card Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09641/) (2024)
- [LLMs and Childhood Safety: Identifying Risks and Proposing a Protection Framework for Safe Child-LLM Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11242/) (2025)
- [Neglected Risks: The Disturbing Reality of Children's Images in Datasets and the Urgent Call for Accountability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14446/) (2025)
- [Stories and Systems: Educational Interactive Storytelling to Teach Media Literacy and Systemic Thinking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11059/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Social narratives help autistic children understand and navigate social situations through stories. To ensure effective practice, however, they often require significant time and effort from parents in customizing the narrative materials and delivering repeated instructions on them. We present AutiHero, a generative AI (GenAI)-based social narrative system, which supports parents to create personalized, multi-path stories targeting specific behavior of their autistic children, while enabling them to explore behavioral choices and causal consequences together in reading. A two-week deployment study with 16 autistic child-parent dyads showed that parents actively created, adapted, and read stories with their children, with increased confidence in everyday behavioral guidance. Our work contributes real-world-contextualized text+image content creation approaches harnessing GenAI, ensuring user-aligned application in sensitive contexts involving autistic children and their parents.